


A Wolf in Sheep's Clothing - Meta on John in the Army

by Provocatrixxx



Category: British Military - Fandom, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: British, British Military, Meta, Military, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-11
Updated: 2013-12-14
Packaged: 2018-01-04 08:56:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Provocatrixxx/pseuds/Provocatrixxx
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>My take on John Watson's military career from Selection through to Discharge. Currently does not look at his life thereafter.</p><p>This is not by any means the <i>only</i> solution, it's simply the one that best fits with what we see on screen and with my own experiences. As ever, when writing fiction, the characters are king and the rules are more guidelines than actual rules...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Introduction

**Author's Note:**

> ETA 11/12/2013 - The links are now working (thank you so much [Levynite](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Levynite/pseuds/Levynite)!). Please let me know in the comments if I've not explained something, or something is confusing. <3

Anyone who knows me is aware that I am only in this fandom for John. He was the draw right from the start, and those two minutes of sand and rifle-fire nightmare at the beginning of A Study in Pink gave me so much hope for what was to come. And we got most of it. This incarnation of John is every inch the soldier.

But the more I looked into it, the more tangled and confusing John’s career became. Sherlock calls him ‘an Army Doctor’, but John’s a ridiculously talented marksman. John works as a GP throughout both series, but twice alludes to having been a Captain in the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers. What is going on with this brilliant, lethal man?

Having been through the commissioning process myself, I thought I’d take a crack at untangling John. I’m working from what canon has showed us, as well as my own knowledge and experience, and I’ve got something approaching the expected arc of John’s career down. I’m not happy with it, since the balance of presented evidence points to John having been RAMC, and I would do anything to put him in the infantry. A lot of his character traits fit better with his having been infantry, as does some of the body language and explanations he uses. I may have another crack at this at a later date and see what I can find to put him in the infantry for sure, but for now, I’m working with what the Sherlock writers have presented to us.

Standby, this is a long meta. I've split it down into chapters for ease. I suggest you [read it in one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046?view_full_work=true), but here’s the basic structure in case you want to skip:

[Education](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2168372)  
[Joining the Army](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2168375)  
[Further Training and John’s Qualifications](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2168379)  
[Life in the Army](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2168380)  
[Leaving the Army](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2168388)  
[Postscript - Rejected Career Paths](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2168390)

[John’s CV is a bit of a mess both in terms of what qualifications he actually holds and the years in which he gained them. I’m largely going to ignore the dates in here, and talk instead about the hoops John would have jumped through to get to where he is when we meet him in A Study in Pink.

For the purposes of this Meta, I’ve given John a Birthday in 1979, which makes him 35 when we meet him in Study. Therefore, John leaves school in 1997, and graduates from University in 2002.]


	2. Education

In the UK, compulsory schooling happens in two distinct phases. At approximately age five, children are sent to primary school. The classes here begin with ‘Reception’ and then move on through Years One, Two, Three, and all the way up to Year Six, which is the final year of primary school. During their final year, pupils will usually sit Statutory Assessment Tests (or SATs), though these don’t necessarily have any bearing on what happens to them next. John presumably did reasonably well at school, since he went on to pass an entrance exam for his secondary school and eventually became a doctor.

From John’s CV, we see that he attended [King Edward Grammar School](http://www.kegs.org.uk) (KEGS) in Chelmsford for his Secondary Education. KEGS is a boy’s only selective (though not fee paying) school, meaning that prospective pupils have to live in the catchment area and pass an entrance exam in order to be admitted to the school. The entrance exam, or ‘Eleven Plus’ is designed to be challenging, since far more boys apply to the school than the school has places.

We can assume, therefore, that John was academically intelligent from a reasonably young age, and probably even go so far as to assume that his homelife was relatively stable, since his parents would have have to have seen fit to enter him for the exams and probably helped him to study for them.

Secondary Schools run from school years Seven to Eleven, and many, like KEGS, also have a Sixth Form for pupils who wish to stay on after the age of sixteen.

KEGS also supports a range of extra-curricular activities, the most interesting of which, for this meta at least, is the [mention of a Combined Cadet Force](http://www.kegs.org.uk/ccf/2607.html) (CCF). The CCF is a programme run in schools by the Ministry of Defence which teaches a watered down version of military skills and leadership. I, personally, believe that this is where John decided that he wanted to join the army, simply because he doesn’t strike me as being from a military family. The CCF at KEGS looks to be entirely voluntary, in the manner of a choir of drama society though, and this leads me to think that John probably had an inclination towards military service from quite early on.

In John’s day, full time education would have been compulsory up until the age of 16, at which point John would have taken General Certificates of Secondary Education (GCSEs) in anywhere from about nine to twelve subjects. Although his CV makes no mention of his A-Levels, John would have to have taken them in order to become a doctor, so we can assume that he stayed on at KEGS for Sixth Form and took four A-Levels, (probably including Chemistry, Biology, possibly Maths and something else. English? History? Who knows).

So, at the age of 18, John leaves school with his GCSEs and A-Levels and goes on to University with the aim of becoming a doctor and joining the Army. Already, he’s a man who’s not afraid to work hard and get his hands dirty. We can see from his CV that John was accepted to study medicine at King’s College London. Medical degrees in the UK take five years to complete, and there is an extra year between the first two and the final three, bringing the total years of study that John would have undertaken up to six. I am not a medical student, so I can’t provide much insight beyond what the University’s own [website](http://www.kcl.ac.uk/prospectus/undergraduate/index/name/medicine/alpha/MNO/header_search/) tells us.

What I can talk about, however, is where John’s military aspirations fit into this. The Army is always in need of good doctors, and they’re in far shorter supply than, say, Infantry Officers. Therefore, medical students who wish to join the army are offered more incentives than the rest of us. In John’s day, the Army offered roughly 50 medical scholarships per year, though this number has been fluctuating enormously over the past six years or so. Medical students would apply for these prior to their third year of study, and if successful, the Army would pay them a grant over their final three years so long as they committed the next six years of their lives to the army.

Now, I don’t think that this was John’s path, for a few reasons. Firstly, only limited numbers of students are accepted for Army Sponsorship, so in terms of mathematical probability, the odds of John receiving one are relatively low. Secondly, all medical degrees require prospective doctors to undergo two years of clinical training (F1 and F2), which, if his CV is in any way correct, John undertook at University College Hospital London and then his second posting at Broomfield Hospital Chelmsford. Had he been on a Medical Cadetship, the Army would have been more likely to send him to an MoD Hospital Unit at Portsmouth or Selly Oak. 

My third reason is a little more subjective, and has everything to do with wanting to pin the combat element of John down. Army Medical Cadets are put on a pre-determined path which guides them from third year, through clinical training, on to the Professionally Qualified Officers’ course at Sandhurst and commissioning and then into their roles. In this time, Potential Medical Officers receive virtually no combat training. The simplest explanation for this is that they don’t need it. Active fighting is not a part of their role. I can’t see John being quite satisfied with that so soon. It doesn’t fit with how he comes across as a character. It doesn’t work with him shooting the Cabbie in ASiP, with the way he watches over Sherlock in TRF, or with any of the thousand other insignificant details that help us build the picture of John’s military service.

Instead, I propose that John put himself through University. It seems reasonable that he could have joined the [University Officer Training Corps](http://www.army.mod.uk/UOTC/5458.aspx) (UOTC), an organisation run by the Army specifically for university students who wish to persue a career in the Armed Forces. Although attending the OTC with any sort of regularity would have left John squeezed for time, it is doable, and would go someway to explaining the infantry skills John seems to have picked up. The OTC offer opportunities to train with different units of the Army, so it seems likely to me that John could have picked up some of his marksmanship and some limited tactical and field skills from this organisation.

This interpretation fits with the majority of John’s CV (ignoring the dates). After graduating from University then, we assume that John was set on becoming a Medical Officer with the Army.


	3. Joining the Army

[Because John is a switched on sort of a person, I’m assuming that he did a lot of research into becoming a Medical Officer before he chose to make it his career. Therefore, there are a couple of things in this section which John would probably have done during his final few years at University.]

I’m going to take a detour first for a quick and dirty explanation of how the Army works. Basically, there are three arms and two tiers of the Army. The three arms are Combat, Support, and Service Support. The first is self explanatory and consists of the infantry and the cavalry (tank regiments). The second incorporates the Engineers, the Signals, the Artillery, and the Intelligence Corps. And finally, the Service Support Arm houses everyone else and most importantly for us, the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). Across these three arms are two tiers of responsibility: the Commissioned Officers, and the Other Ranks. In the simplest terms, soldiers do things, and officers manage soldiers, enabling them to do things. There’s a better explanation of ranks and what they mean [over here](https://www.army.mod.uk/structure/32321.aspx).

John then is aiming to join the RAMC as a Medical Officer (or, a doctor). The first step is to pass the Officer Selection process. The current process for this was introduced in 2009, and is slightly different than the process which John would have undertaken. I’m going to talk about the old one, because it’s relevant to John, but if you’re doing background reading, be aware that anything from 2009 onwards is slightly different to what John would have experienced. 

Prior to 2009, candidates interested in joining the RAMC as MOs had to undertake the Regular Commissioning Board (RCB) and then the RAMC Arms Selection Board (ASB).

Until 2004, all candidates wishing to commission into the Regular Army had to sit the Regular Commissioning Board, RCB. It followed the same structure, more or less as the current Army Officer Selection Board. The board consists of two parts: the [Briefing](www.army.mod.uk/documents/general/AOSB_Briefing.pdf), and then the [Main Board](www.army.mod.uk/documents/general/AOSB_Main_Board.pdf). Once John had passed his Main Board, he would have gone on to the RAMC Arms Selection Board, which would have been a series of interviews with serving MOs and other assorted officers, confirming his qualifications and suitability for the role.

Once John passes his selection process, he has to attend the Professional Qualified Officers commissioning course at the Royal Military Academy [Sandhurst](http://www.army.mod.uk/training_education/training/17057.aspx). Sandhurst is the only officer training school in the UK and it runs a ten-week long [PQO course](http://www.army.mod.uk/training_education/25497.aspx) annually in August. This course is designed to give PQOs basic soldiering skills and allow them to integrate into the Army. Although the link suggests that it’s based on the Regular Commissioning Course, there is nowhere near the same emphasis on fitness and soldiering, and PQOs are generally treated more like professionals than other Officer Cadets. This is due, in part, to the fact that they receive their commissions before entering RMAS.

At Sandhurst, John would have been taught everything from basic soldiering skills such as map reading, personal administration in the field, and foot drill, to more complex lessons in tactics, military history, and global politics. Again, because the PQO course is less intense, the degree to which these lessons would have been relevant to him is limited, but I think canon John would have taken a lot more out of it than most.

John would also have taken part in field exercises during his time at RMAS. These are the scenarios in which soldiers put their training into action. In the first couple of weeks, these exercises focus on basic soldiering skills, but as the course progresses, the exercises become more complex. Unlike the RAF who expect their Officer Cadets to perform their chosen roles throughout training, the Army focuses on making everyone a soldier first, and therefore John will have carried out various infantry-based roles in his time at Sandhurst.

Upon Passing Out of Sandhurst, PQO’s are generally promoted to the rank of Captain. In the case of Medical Officers, this is to allow them to be paid at the appropriate level. In other corps, this is to give them the right level of authority within the rank structure to enable them to do their jobs effectively.


	4. Further Training and John’s Qualifications

Since we know that John trained as a GP, and from what we see of his military experience in canon, it makes sense for him to have specialised in Battlefield Medicine. This is the easiest way to get John into the middle of the action.

Having completed Sandhurst, John would have gone on to do his Entry Officers Course at the Defence Medical Services Training Centre in Hampshire.This is a three week course that focuses on operational medical planning and deals with providing medical support to military operations. 

This course is generally followed by the Postgraduate Medical Officers Course. This course lasts for around 14 weeks and focuses specifically on turning doctors into Military Doctors. During this course, John would have studied Battlefield Advanced Trauma Life Support (BATLS), as well as learnt how to deliver effective medical care with limited resources under austere conditions. 

Unfortunately, not being medically inclined, my knowledge becomes somewhat limited at this point. Where Sandhurst would have taught John to be a soldier, these courses over the next year of his career focus on turning John into a Medical Officer. Where he goes from here is a lot more confusing.


	5. Life in the Army

Canon shows us John as a GP, and this suggests that John is likely to have been a Regimental Medical Officer at some point in his military career. RMOs are similar to civilian GPs, dealing with the general medical needs of whatever unit they are attached to. When the unit goes out on operational tours, the RMO goes with them to continue providing medical support.

This is where things start to get complicated because John’s life and career options out on Ops are going to be vastly different to his life in other postings.

Firstly, Doctors are valuable assets to any military, so they are generally kept as safe as possible. The easiest way to achieve this is to keep doctors away behind the lines, back in camps and easily defended bases such as Camp Bastion. Unfortunately, modern warfare doesn’t really have a ‘front line’, and infantrymen are the ones who need medical support the most. This is where the [footage at the beginning of ASiP](http://provocatrixxx.tumblr.com/post/61590084298) comes into play. As AQ points out in her [fabulous John meta](http://archiveofourown.org/works/319040/chapters/513058), the footage itself is taken from the documentary ‘Inside Afghanistan’, so what we see on our screens needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. AQ goes into a lot of detail over the footage, and if you haven’t already, you should definitely go and check out what she has to say.

The first gif of the footage shows the interior of a Forward Operating Base or FOB with the sandbags built up on top of Hesco bastions, and from there we move off into Afghanistan proper. From this, we can extrapolate that John was very much a hands on kind of MO, going out on the ground with his troops rather than staying in the relative safety of the FOB. The [3 Med Reg tag](http://britisharmy.wordpress.com/category/3-med-regt/) on the British Army’s Wordpress gives a useful overview of this sort of work (Captain Ramakrishna’s a fascinating read as well). I also think this would have been a good fit for John based on the competence we see in Hounds. Medical personnel are worth their weight in gold, but John’s ability to handle himself, along with his presumed familiarity with basic soldiering, would have made him well suited to going out on the ground.

**Injury**

In Conan-Doyle’s canon, Watson is ‘struck on the shoulder by a Jezail bullet, which shattered the bone and grazed the subclavian artery’ and later ‘struck down by enteric fever’, which almost kills him again (seriously, go and talk to AQ about all of this, it’s fascinating and I know only the bare bones of it). 

As far as I can tell, the Sherlock writers have tried to keep to most of this, therefore John has both an actual shoulder injury (leading to tremors in his left hand), and a ‘psychosomatic’ limp in his leg. Modern medicine has advanced since the 1880s, so we can assume that John was shot while tending to a soldier because the unit were still caught up in a firefight. He would then have been evacuated by helicopter, stabilised, and then flown out to the UK for treatment. I suggest that the process was not an easy one on John, hence the trauma, and would further posit that his leaving the platoon caused further loss of life for them. John’s general manner and personality suggest he carries something more than pain from that particular encounter.


	6. Leaving the Army

This is by far the most complicated and confusing part of unravelling John’s military past. I’ve looked at several options, and I’ve narrowed it down to two that are likely, and an additional one that could also fit. I’m going to go through them in order of simplicity.

**Option One - Standard Medical Discharge**

Obviously, there’s a big focus on fitness and physical health within the Army. Soldiers undergo medical assessments frequently, and the results of these assessments are converted into a PULHHEEMS Employment Status or PES Score. You want a low score, so P1 or 2 is good, while P8 means that the soldier is unfit for duty. Soldiers can be moved up and down the scale for minor injuries, so if you broke your leg you would be medically downgraded to about a P4, but only while your leg was healing; or be permanently downgraded, so if you lost some of your hearing on a shooting range, you might be dropped down to P2. [For further info on PULHHEEMS and medical grading, see [Appendix One](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1079046/chapters/2176404)

We know that John was shot through the shoulder while in Afghanistan. In ACD’s canon, he also contracts a fever from these injuries, which leaves him very weak and necessitates his return to England. The shoulder damage would certainly require a medical downgrade, at least for a while. If the ‘psychosomatic’ limp also shows up at about the same, then there are grounds to have John discharged for medical reasons. He’s too injured to do the job he was hired for.

The mechanics of this discharge are like so:

  1. Soldier receives an injury (or multiple injuries) leaving them unable to perform in their current role.
  2. Soldier’s Commanding Officer fills out a lot of paperwork explaining that the soldier is no longer able to be used by the unit and sends them before a Regional Occupational Health Team (ROHT). They look at whether the soldier can be used in a different role within the unit, or transferred to and used in a different unit.
  3. If the soldier can no longer be used in any role, he is sent before the Army Medical Board for further assessment relating to his pension, and eventually discharged on Medical Grounds.



This matches up with some of what we know of John. He is not in good shape physically when we first meet him in ASiP. However, within a few days of meeting Sherlock, John is running around London, shooting rogue taxi-drivers, and generally being active. My biggest problem with this route is that MOs are massively valuable assets the Army. I just can’t see John being dismissed over injuries that have the potential to heal, especially when canon shows us that he is still capable of working as a GP. Any reasonable Occupational Health team would have transferred him out to a quiet posting as someone’s Regimental Medical Officer in order to retain his skills. So, for me, this option doesn’t work at all.

**Option Two - John Got Transferred into a role he didn’t want**

No Occupational Health team is going to discharge John Watson for the injuries we know about. Instead, they’re going to permanently downgrade him, and move him over into an Admin role. Now, the most sensible role that I can see is to make John the Regimental Medical Officer for a regiment that aren’t deploying for a while. The RMO functions rather like a GP with some additional skills. This would have suited John perfectly.

The beauty of this option is that it allows us to explain a little of why John is sometimes introduced as ‘Captain John Watson, 5th Northumberland Fusiliers’. While all Medical Officers belong to the RAMC, and John would have retained his cap badge there, he would also have become part of the Regimental Family of whatever unit he was attached to. I sometimes introduce myself as belonging to a regiment which no-longer technically exists because I spent more time belonging to them than I have anyone else. I shouldn’t do that, but I do (and I’m not the only one), because that regiment means more to me than any of the other capbadges I’ve worn since. If John was angry with the RAMC for how they treated him, I can see him feeling more of a sense of belonging to another unit.

Interestingly, although the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers were amalgamated to the point of no return many decades ago, the Fifth Battalion of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers is the TA battalion. TA units are supported and administered by Regular Soldiers and Officers. It is not beyond reason that John could have been assigned to the Fifth Battalion in a support role. Again, he would technically have been badged RAMC, but to all intents and purposes, he would become part of the unit.

[Quick Note on the TA: The TA is the Territorial Army and is somewhat similar to the US's National Guard. They're fully trained soldiers who work civilian jobs by day, but train with the Army once a week and also on alternate weekends. They're fully deployable, and are sent out to warzones as units in their own right, as well as having individuals used to 'backfill' regular (full time) units that are not at full strength. TA units have full time staff from the regular army who aid administration. Some regular soldiers join the TA once they leave the full time army.]

**Option Three - Something Horrific Happened to John in Afghanistan**

This is the least feasible or rational explanation of the three. I’m not sure I really believe it could have happened, but bear with me, because a lot of things fit into this theory:

At some point during his final tour, John gets taken hostage. Now, as a Medical Officer, we can surmise that perhaps he was treating patients behind a fire-fight, and he and his patients were overwhelmed and taken captive. Sherlock refers to John as ‘a war hero’ in ASiP, and while I actually think this was just a turn of phrase, it could suggest that John did more than just standard MO duties while out in the desert.

So, John gets taken captive. This accounts in some way for his PTSD depending on what we want to imagine may have happened to him during that time. Some time later, the British Army launch a rescue mission to bring him back in. This could account for the footage we see at the beginning of ASiP, which shows soldiers kicking doors down. During this rescue, John gets shot in the shoulder, and his general run-down condition means that this injury nearly destroys him.

After returning to the UK then, John is told to keep quiet about what happened to him. This would account for why he is suddenly discharged from the Army fast enough to still be carrying tan lines, and also explain why an Army short on MOs let go of a fully-competent GP.

It’s not the theory I would put my money on, personally, but I have to admit, I am intrigued by how many of the pieces add up. And I do prefer this to the theory that John caused someone intentional damage and was discharged on grounds of being a liability.


	7. Postscript - Rejected Career Paths

  1. **John joined the Infantry instead of the RAMC** The simple reason I rejected this line is that we know John works as a locum GP once he comes out of the Army. In order to do this, John has to have kept up with his qualifications and experience. He couldn’t even have done this by working as a Combat Medic, since these are non-commissioned, and are not qualified as doctors. It’s also not something he could have done on a resettlement course, especially since he still has his desert tan-lines when he meets Sherlock in ASiP. As delicious as it would be for John to have been an Infantry Officer, it just doesn’t fit with his being a doctor, and we have more evidence of his doctoring than of his having been in the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers.
  2. **John joined 16 Close Support Medical Regiment / did some other sneaky beaky job** This one I rejected for ease and simplicity. Because John’s story fits with the more standard RAMC career route, I decided to explore that one first and not bring anything more complicated into it. I might look down this route at a later date because it is fascinating (not to mention stupidly hot), but it also takes a lot of jumping through hoops on John’s part. It would increase the likelihood of John getting caught up in something awkward which ended his military career, however.
  3. **John was in the RAMC, but went on to join the Infantry instead (any permutation thereof)** This one is largely covered, again, by the fact that John works as a GP in TBB, but since I’ve seen it come up a few times, here’s a more in-depth explanation: It all comes down to the fact that Medical Officers are Professionally Qualified Officers and therefore have a completely different role and a completely different set of training to infantry officers. PQOs are used for their expertise in their chosen field. They do their jobs in warzones, but they do the same job as their civilian counterparts. Infantry Officers exist to lead troops and fight battles. They spend a year at Sandhurst learning how to command, and then undertake a further four months of training on the Platoon Commander’s Battle Course . It’s not possible for a PQO to jump across to the infantry. And that’s without getting into how much competition there is for command roles in the Infantry, or the fact that the Army tries desperately hard to retain the rapidly decreasing Medical Officers they do have. It’s also not possible for John to resign his PQO commission and then rejoin the Army in an infantry role. Again, John’s qualifications as a GP would lapse if he did this.



**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Further Reading**
> 
>   * BMJ Careers page on becoming a Medical Officer
>   * Frontline Medicine Q&A with an RAF Medical Officer
>   * [The British Army’s Official Wordpress](%E2%80%9Dbritisharmy.wordpress.com%E2%80%9D)
>   * AbundantlyQueer’s The Strange Case of the Army Doctor’s Worn-Out Boots
>   * [My Meta Tag](http://provocatrixxx.tumblr.com/tagged/meta)
> 



	8. Appendix 1 - PULHEEMS / Medical Assessments

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A more detailed explanation of the system for medical assessment and it's implications for injured soldiers. Hopefully it's useful for looking at how John got discharged and then went on to work as a GP.

Service personnel in all three forces are medically assessed according to the guidelines set out in Joint Service Publication (JSP) 346. The document is ‘designed to provide a framework for the medical assessment of functional capacity of potential recruits and serving personnel from which can be derived a determination of fitness for service’. Assessment is carried out using a framework known as the PULHHEEMS System of Medical Classification. The acronym stands for:

P Physical Capacity  
U Upper Limbs  
L Locomotion  
HH Hearing Acuity (right and left)  
EE Visual Acuity (right and left, uncorrected and corrected)  
M Mental Capacity  
S Stability (Emotional)

Your initial medical as part of selection is carried out in accordance with this framework, and is most entertaining for the locomotion tests, in which candidates are often required to hop around the room like a bunny rabbit. I’m not sure whether it’s actually a useful test, or the medics just get bored of administering the same tests 50 times over.

Each area of the test is graded between 1 and 8, and then the overall grade is calculated and this becomes your PULHHEEMS Employment Status (PES) Score. We usually abbreviate this further, so you refer to a downgrade as being downgraded to P4.

The breakdown of PES Scores is:

2 - Medically fit for unrestricted service worldwide  
3 - Medically fit for duty with minor employment limitations  
4 - Medically fit for duty within the limitations of pregnancy  
7 - Medically fit for duty with major employment limitations  
8 - Medically unfit for service  
0 - Medically unfit for duty and under medical care (P quality only)

[P0 is a special case and relates to people under medical care (ie, those currently in hospital). Being graded P0 exempts them from tasks and obligations and is a temporary grade used while people are healing. It’s usually only applied when the condition is expected to last for a month or so.]

The grade you’re given when you first join up is considered to be a permanent grading, and subsequent reassessment then happens every five years. You also get re-assessed after injuries and you’re sometimes required to be assessed before you go on certain courses, especially ones with high levels of physical activity.

People can be downgraded for temporary injuries, and in this instance, the letter R for remedial gets put in after your P score (so a broken wrist might give you a score of P3R because you can still do office-based work, but you can’t fire a rifle, but the broken wrist is expected to heal, so the downgrade is not permanent). Depending on your role, a downgrading can mean being moved to another unit and tasked with a different job.

**Medical and Administrative Discharges**

Obviously, the Army can’t keep people employed if they are medically unfit to serve. Therefore, anyone who winds up with a P8 grading, usually due to serious injury from which they are not expected to recover, is discharged from the Army on medical grounds.

Administrative Discharges are a bit more complicated, but if you’re medically graded P7 and therefore fit for only limited service, the Army in its current state is likely to set you on the path to be discharged. This is largely because the Armed Forces as a whole are subject to severe cuts in funding and are under pressure to reduce their payroll. The most efficient way of doing this it by weeding out anyone who is unable to perform their role to the required degree.

I’m going to relate this back to John Watson briefly and suggest that his injuries were not sufficient for him to receive a P8 grading, but may have been enough for him to be permanently downgraded to P7 due to the tremors in his hand and the limp in his leg. This, combined with his PTSD would probably have been enough for the Army to begin the process of Administratively Discharging him.


End file.
